Winning King's Approval

David Konow: Did you have any input from Stephen King at all?

Larry Karaszewski: Yeah, he'd come over to our office and hang out, kick ideas around...[laughs] No, of course not! What are you joking? From what we've heard anecdotally, King has a real sort of interesting laissez-faire, let the art determine its own course attitude with the movie adaptations. If you look at King adaptations, he'll essentially option his work to anybody who shows enthusiasm, and then just let them go with God and see what they come up with.

Scott Alexander: He won't let you use his name for advertising and publicity if he doesn't like the movie. And this is the first film in a long time he likes. He likes our movie very much.

"1408" also stars Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager.

David Konow: Did you feel it was important to have King's endorsement for the film?

Scott Alexander: Yeah. There was the day they said, "Alright, we think the script's ready to ship up to Stephen in Maine," and a few days later, we got word back he was very pleased. That was very important to the team that the master was happy with our work. It's a film we're very, very proud of. We think it's definitely something that hasn't been done before. We think John Cusack's unbelievable in it, and it's a very smart horror film. We hope it finds its audience.

David Konow: You've been known as the weird biopic guys. With this project did you want to reinvent yourselves, or break out of a pigeonhole at all?

Larry Karaszewski: I don't think it's that calculated. We've always tried to do different things. We've always tried to do challenging stuff. We worked on scripts that were musicals; we always tried to spread our wings as much as we possibly can, and one of the things we felt we should eventually try was a horror film. I don't know if it's something we're going to do with any kind of consistency, but it was a great experience.

Scott Alexander: We probably took the job for the usual perverse reasons: it seemed like the idea couldn't work, and that's why we've taken most of our jobs, [when] there's something so inherently wrong with the premise. "It's only one guy and one set? Come on, you can't make that into a movie." So we enjoyed the rolling up our sleeves challenge of it.

Larry Karaszewski: As soon as someone says, "You can't make that into a movie," we get excited. Certainly in King's giant body of work, "Misery" and "The Shining" are the ones that have a lot in common with this one in terms of the claustrophobia and the madness. We share that in common. He's telling it with a much smaller cast; "Misery" had two people, "The Shining" had four or five, and we got one.

David Konow: You're slated to do another Stephen King adaptation, "Cell," for director Eli Roth. How did that come about?

Larry Karaszewski: It came about basically because this movie turned out so well, and we had a great relationship with Bob Weinstein, so that when he came up with this other Stephen King project we really were enjoying the collaboration. So that's why we did it.

Scott Alexander: It's a completely different animal than "1408." It gives us a little more freedom in terms of our usual kind of satiric writing because it's about cell phones destroying the world, turning people into zombies.

Larry Karaszewski: For me, that's why I was willing to take the job. I thought a movie making sharp commentary on how people have fallen back on all of these mechanical means of communicating with each other instead of just communicating with the person across the room from you was worthy of a big movie. It grounds the horror and the zombie stuff into really good commentary about the world we're living in. Particularly having kids, having a teenager, looking at how important that technology has become to them; I think it's a story they really could identify with.

Scott Alexander: Right now we're trying to chop down our massive first half of the script. In terms of the King collection, it probably falls into "The Stand"-type of story. Like a magnet, it ends up grabbing a lot of characters, a lot of people and a lot of ground. It kind of gets bigger and bigger as it goes along. That was tough in terms of trying to chop it down to movie length.

[Update: This week Roth stated via his Myspace blog that he's taking the rest of the year to work on some of his own projects and that he's "not directing 'Cell' anytime soon." The movie was schedule to begin shooting sometime later this summer or fall. However, the blog entry has apparently been deleted.]

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